… it just has to sound plausible

Monthly Archives: July 2013

Yet more books purchased since my last book haul post. For some of them, I have an excuse – it’s research, dammit! or, it’s for SF Mistressworks; or, I read the first x books in the series, so… But some of the others: nope, sorry, no excuse, no idea why I bought them. Oh well, never mind.

Some non-fiction: Faulks on Fiction because it’s one of the few books by him I’ve not read; Ages in Chaos from the closing down sale of my local book shop because it looked interesting; Diver is a charity shop find to go with the other books on deep sea exploration; Mission to Mars is for the space books collection and is signed; and Project Terminated because Cold War aircraft that never made it off the drawing-board or beyond prototype – such as the Avro Arrow, North American Aviation XF-108 Rapier or BAC TSR.2 – are cool.

Some science fiction, because I do still read it, you know. A pair of SF Masterworks: Wasp, which I’m pretty sure I read years ago; and The Caltraps of Time, which is new to me. In fact, I’d never heard of Masson until this collection appeared in the SF Masterwork series, and I consider myself well-read in the genre. A pair for SF Mistressworks: Mooving Moosevan is the sequel to The Planet Dweller, which I reviewed on SF Mistressworks here; and A Spaceship Built of Stone and Other Stories is a collection of Tuttle’s short fiction and will also be reviewed at some point.

More science fiction. Fireflood and Other Stories for SF Mistressworks; Spin I bought at Edge-Lit 2 because I like Nina’s fiction; Boneshaker was a freebie from Edge-Lit 2 and while I’m no fan of steampunk I might give this one a go to see what all the fuss is about; and The Secret People was really difficult to find and the only reason I wanted a copy was so I could read the original version before I read the spiced-up Beacon Books’ version, The Deviates. I really must make a start on my Beacon Books reading project one of these days…

And finally some mainstream fiction: a short story collection from DH Lawrence, Love Among the Haystacks, though I might have read some of the contents elsewhere – I’m pretty sure I’ve read the title novella; After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is another from my local book shop’s closing down sale, picked up because M John Harrison recommended Rhys ages ago; and Kingdom of Strangers is the third in a crime series set in Jeddah and I quite enjoyed the earlier two books.

(Again, except for one small press title and a couple of OOP books all the links on this post go to Foyles.)

Okay, so SF Signal posted this last Sunday, but I was in Berlin then, with no access to a computer. And yes, I had an excellent time, despite the weekend’s inauspicious start: getting up at 2:30 am, wandering down to the kitchen to make breakfast and stepping on a slug; and then getting to the airport and realising I’d left my credit and debit cards at home (fortunately, I had plenty of cash). Anyway, the meme…

My favorite alien invasion book or series is…?
Probably the Marq’ssan Cycle by L Timmel Duchamp, although Gwyneth Jones’ Aleutian trilogy runs a close second. Duchamp’s five novels – Alanya to Alanya, Renegade, Tsunami, Blood in the Fruit and Stretto – document the arrival on a near-future Earth of an alien mission which will only talk to women. Supporting character turned chief villain Elizabeth Weatherall is one of the genre’s best creations. Jones’ White Queen, North Wind and Phoenix Café cover similar ground, but from a more global perspective. It also features, like Duchamp’s quintet, an extremely well-drawn antagonist in Braemar Wilson. Both series are intensely political and among the smartest books in science fiction.

My favorite alternate history book or series is…?
The Apollo Quartet, of course. But seriously: I’d say Ascent by Jed Mercurio, but naming it as alternate history might constitute a spoiler. It could also be argued that the superb Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle is alternate history. I think I’ve read my fair share of Hitler-victorious alternate histories, and I suspect there are very few changes remaining to be rung on that particular trope. Not being American, I’ve little interest in their civil war and how it might have ended differently. Stephen Baxter’s alternate take on the US space programme, Voyage, appeals for obvious reasons. And many sf novels of the past written about exploring Mars and the Moon may not have been written as alternate history, but they pretty much qualify as it now. Unfortunately, most twentieth-century sf novels about twenty-first space travel, such as those by Steele or Bova, suffer from being, well, not very good. Sadly, early and alternate space travel doesn’t seem to be an area of the genre that has attracted writers with much in the way of writing chops. Which is a shame.

My favorite cyberpunk book or series is…?Metrophage by Richard Kadrey, the book which folded cyberpunk back into science fiction. Everything that came after is just the twitchings of a dead subgenre.

My favorite Dystopian book or series is…?
Dystopia is in the eye of the beholder. If you read Francis Spufford’s excellent Red Plenty, you’ll see that not everyone thought the USSR was a dystopia. And for all the UK’s fabled streets of gold, it’s starting to look more and more like a dystopia each day to those of us living here. As for reading about dystopias… I don’t think it’s been done especially well in science fiction – but then Nineteen Eighty-Four casts a long shadow. Some of DG Compton’s works from the 1970s might be considered dystopian, such as The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe; and in Ascendancies, he manages to find a dystopian story in a near-utopian society. JG Ballard wrote plenty of novels and short stories which might qualify, but no specific title springs to mind – it’s probably best to consider his entire oeuvre as dystopian fiction. And you can’t really go wrong by reading them all.

My favorite Golden-Age sf book or series is…?
AE van Vogt’s The House That Stood Still (AKA The Undercover Aliens), which mixes California noir and pulp sf and just about manages to get away with it, is one of my favourite sf novels. It’s completely bonkers, of course; but it’s one of van Vogt’s more coherent works. Which isn’t saying much. Recently, I’ve read some early sf by women writers and found it much better than the so-called classics I read as a kid – these days, I find EE ‘Doc’ Smith, Robert A Heinlein and Isaac Asimov near-unreadable. There’s also an early Brian Aldiss novel, Equator, which I really like, though it’s more like spy fiction with added aliens than science fiction per se. Which may be one reason why I find it so appealing.

My favorite hard sf book or series is…?
The Apollo Quartet, of course. But seriously: it’s probably Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. I don’t read that much hard sf as such. When I need my real science kicks, I read books about space or deep sea exploration. There are very, very few hard sf novels which come even remotely close to emulating the authenticity those books possess.

My favorite military sf book or series is…?
I don’t have much time for military science fiction, though in the past I’ve read my fair share – including David Weber, Tanya Huff, Elizabeth Moon, Jack Campbell, David Feintuch, John Steakley, and probably a few others. The only such books left on my book-shelves, and which may well get purged should I ever get around to rereading them, are Richard Fawkes’ Face of the Enemy and Nature of the Beast, which I remember as quite interesting. Also worth a go is Shariann Lewitt’s debut novel, Angel at Apogee, and her two Collegium novels, Cyberstealth and Dancing Vac. And if any of CJ Cherryh’s books qualify, then they’re certainly worth reading.

My favorite near-future book or series is…?
I don’t think I have one. I’ve always been a fan of John Varley’s Eight Worlds novels and short stories, but do they count as near-future? Gwyneth Jones’ Kairos, a favourite novel, was near-future when it was published, but that was back in 1988 – and these days it reads more like alternate history. The same might well prove true of Ken MacLeod’s excellent Intrusion a decade from now. Another excellent near-future novel is Maureen F McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, though despite being two decades old it has yet to become alternate history – perhaps because it doesn’t feel like it’s set in a near-future which might well happen.

My favorite post-apocalyptic book or series is…?
To be honest, I’m not interested in how Americans would react should their society collapse, nor do I believe that every single person on the planet would react in that way. Which pretty much discounts ninety-nine percent of post-apocalyptic novels. The only one that springs to mind as different is Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids, which shows the world – all of it – coping with the aftermath of climate crash and nation-state failures. Perhaps the best of the more traditional post-apocalyptic novels is Joan Slonczewski’s The Wall Around Eden, in which mysterious aliens save isolated pockets of humanity. It reads like a masterclass in sf and deserves to be back in print.

My favorite robot/android book or series is…?
Science fiction’s treatment of robots has always been silly. They’re either human in all but name and yet treated like slaves, or blatant signifiers for slaves. In remarkably few sf stories do they actually resemble real robots.

My favorite space opera book or series is…?
I’ve always enjoyed Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, though I think the individual parts are not as impressive as the sum of them. Colin Greenland’s Take Back Plenty has always been a favourite space opera too, and I remember being impressed by Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire when I read it many years ago. Likewise David Herter’s Ceres Storm, which I read back when it was published in 2000. I really must reread it one of these days…

My favorite steampunk book or series is…?
I don’t read steampunk. There’s nothing in it that appeals to me. Airships? Pfft. Give me supersonic jets every time. Brass? Useless metal. And anyway, steel is more emblematic of the British Empire than brass. Difference engines? NASA didn’t put twelve men on the Moon using clockwork computers, did they?

My favorite superhero book or series is…?
I used to read superhero comics by the likes of Warren Ellis and Alan Moore, but went off the whole genre several years ago. I can no longer think of anything nice to say about the genre.

My favorite time travel book or series is…?
I’m more likely to read and enjoy an historical novel than I am a time travel one. I can’t off the top of my head think of any time travel novels that I hold in especially high regard. I remember enjoying Peter Delacorte’s Time on My Hands, which is set in 1940s Hollywood. And Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships takes Wells’ The Time Machine and runs with it… and runs… and runs… I’m a big fan of John Varley’s short story ‘Air Raid’, and I still have a soft spot for the film adaptation Millennium, despite its godawful production design… which does mean I really like the novel written by Varley of the film adapted by Varley of the short story written by Varley…

My favorite young adult sf book or series is…?
I don’t read YA books. I am no longer sixteen, and haven’t been for a few decades.

My favorite zombie book or series is…?
I don’t read zombie books. I don’t even like zombie films. Maybe one day somebody will do something interesting with the trope, but I’m not holding my breath.

The 3 books at the top of my sf/f/h to-be-read pile are…?
Last month, I foolishly agreed to read and blog about half a dozen classic sf novels, so I have The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Foundation to look forward to over the next couple of weeks. Other than that, I have some reading for SF Mistressworks, and I hope to sneak in a few more recent genre novels as well, but I’ve yet to decide which ones. In fact, when you have a TBR of around 700 books, it’s often difficult to pick what to read next and I can sometimes spend ten or twenty minutes feeling really indecisive as I wander from one bookcase to the next…

And now I’ve finished this I’ll no doubt think of books I should have mentioned. Oh well. The more observant among you might also have noticed that all the links on this post go to Foyles using their affiliate scheme (except for the one link to a DVD). I found it relatively easy to use – a little fiddlier than Amazon’s, but not unworkably so. We’ll see how it works out.

Just a quick note to explain my silence last weekend – I was in Berlin. While I’ve visited Germany a number of times, and even lived for three months in Aachen, it was my first trip to that city. My sister and her family were spending the weekend there, so I flew across and met them. It was stinking hot, Unter den Linden was being dug up for a new U-Bahn line and stunk of sewage, the Brandenburger Tor is touristy and disappointing, the Holocaust Memorial is impressive, the Deutsches Technikmuseum is cool (if you like boats and aeroplanes and trains, which I do), the Kurfürstendamm is consumption so conspicuous you can’t see it happen because they won’t let you in the shops unless you’re wearing a gold Rolex or something (the shops even have bouncers!), the Käthe-Kollwitz Museum is worth a look (I especially liked her two graphic cycles, ‘The Weavers’ Revolt’ (1898) and ‘The Peasant War’ (1902 – 1908)), Checkpoint Charlie is a bit rubbish, the stretch of Berlin Wall remaining on Nederkirchnerstraße is worth seeing, as is the Topography of Terror exhibition on the same site…

Far too many capital cities are nice places to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there, but I think I’d happily move to Berlin. We met up with a friend of my brother-in-law, and he lives in Prenzlauer Berg, which used to be East Berlin, and is a very nice area. Plus, of course, the public transport in Berlin is excellent – S-Bahn, U-Bahn, trams and buses. And cheap too. The express train from from Schönefeld airport to Alexanderplatz in the centre of Berlin takes twenty minutes on a large, modern electric train. And costs €3.10. The Heathrow Express costs £20. An all-day zone 1 ticket on the U-Bahn is €6. The worst part about visiting any European city is returning to the UK and realising how comprehensively our robber governments have fucked up our public transport infrastructure. I mean, is there anyone who seriously thinks privatising the railways has improved it? If yes, I have a statue on a very tall plinth in Trafalgar Square for sale…

Despite only being careful and not quizzing every eaterie on the ingredients in their meals, I managed to avoid making myself ill. One café we visited labelled some of its sandwiches “laktosefrei”, but that was the only place I saw doing so. I ate Italian twice, Arabic, and on our last night in Berlin – typically – we discovered Nikolaiviertel just down the road from our hotel, which contains a number of restaurants/bars serving German food. One thing worth noting, however: when in Berlin, don’t wear a black collared shirt with epaulettes. I did, and some bloke wandered past me muttering something about “Totenkopf”.

In all, definitely a place worth visiting, in spite of the weather, and I’d certainly go again. When I was in Aachen in 1992, we considered spending a weekend in Berlin, but discovered we were closer to London and that it would take about nine hours by train. (Even now, it’s still seven hours by ICE from Aachen to Berlin.) It’s a pity we never made the effort, but at least I’ve rectified that now.

SF Signal have taken my idea of a list of 100 Great SF Stories by Women and run with it… and today they’ve posted one of their Mind Melds on that very subject. They extended the criteria to include fantasy and horror as well as novel-length fiction. And they’ve invited a host of interesting people to contribute (including, er, me). There’s lots of excellent suggestions for reading material, so go check it out.

No, not me. Though I suppose if you strapped enough rocket bottles to me, I could probably qualify. Which is what happens – to someone else, I hasten to add – in my story ‘The Incurable Irony of the Man who Rode the Rocket Sled’. It was published yesterday in the The Orphan #5. You can find my story here.

‘The Incurable Irony of the Man who Rode the Rocket Sled’ was inspired by some of the research I did for the Apollo Quartet. I’d come across mention of the rocket sleds that were used in the 1950s to test how many Gs a human body could safely withstand, and I thought it would be pretty cool to write about that. So I did. The end result, however, isn’t exactly typical – as science fiction, my fiction, or even fiction per se: The Orphan itself describes it as possessing “footnotes, no plot, and genre content visible, yet near microscopic”. So, no launching rocket sleds into space to fight aliens or anything. Just a man, the rocket sleds, and the world around him.

They were bonkers, the volunteers on the rocket sled programme – especially the man who created it, John Paul Stapp. But what they achieved did prove useful and ultimately saved many lives. Here’s a USAF information film about rocket sleds, which gives you some idea of what it was all about.

I have to admit the list of 100 Great science fiction stories by women has done considerably better than I expected, and seems to have gone a little bit viral. Loads of people tweeted a link to it, someone posted it on reddit (where a typically clueless number of discussions subsequently took place), it’s been linked from several blogs and sites (including tor.com and SF Signal), and has even appeared on several tumblrs. The hits here have gone through the roof – it is officially my most popular post, with even more hits than the one in which I wrote that Asimov was a shit writer. I was expecting people to turn the list into a meme, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. But it’s not like I’m complaining…

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to stick up a few charts about the list.

The list is slanted a little toward the twenty-first century, but there are more women writing sf now than there were in the first half of last century.

Unsurprisingly, more than half of the list are short stories – ie, 7,500 words or less.

I used the tables of contents of several year’s best to find titles for the list, so these numbers come as no real surprise – but I was surprised to discover that some of the earlier stories had appeared in year’s bests of the 1950s and 1960s.

Again, I looked at award shortlists for titles, so the high number of nominees and winners is not unexpected.

I didn’t use the Locus poll at all, so the number of stories which appeared on it – nearly a third of the list – came as a surprise.

Quite a few of the older stories have been reprinted a huge number of times. The most-reprinted story is Judth Merril’s ‘That Only A Mother’, with 24 reprints, including Women of Wonder – and in my review of that anthology here, I called it “a bona fide classic of the genre”. It seems I’m not the only person who thinks so…

The list below contains 100 pieces of short fiction – short stories, novelettes and novellas – by women writers, published between 1927 and 2012. Each author appears only once. The stories are by no means the best by each writer. In most cases, I’m simply not familiar enough with an oeuvre to choose the best; in other cases, I’ve picked a story I’ve read and thought good, and yes, there are a few of my favourite stories in the list too. I’ve not read them all – some came from suggestions on Twitter or on an earlier post on this blog (many thanks to all who contributed), others I took from various award lists or Year’s Best TOCs. One or two fantasy stories might have sneaked through the net, because I couldn’t find copies to read and check. However, the list should all be science fiction – and it should also demonstrate a good spread of styles and themes and approaches across the genre.

The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that women have been writing good science fiction since the beginnings of the genre – a point signally ignored by the table of contents of the 1978 anthology 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, which contained only five stories by women. The first story on this list, for example, came third in a competition in Amazing Stories during the magazine’s second year of publication.

No doubt there are stories and authors I’ve missed off the list, and which/who you feel strongly should be on it. Tell me so in a comment. Also, feel free to disseminate the list as a meme – you know, bold those you’ve read, italicise those on the TBR; or something like that.